nanoscale views

One thing that the new Dune  film captures extremely well is the idea that the primary small-capacity air transportation mode on Arrakis is...

 Here are several items of interest: I was saddened to learn of the passing of Myriam Sarachik , a great experimental physicist and a gener...

The Purcell effect is named after E. M. Purcell , a Nobel-winning physicist who also was a tremendous communicator, author of one of the gr...

The Nobel Prize in physics this year was a bit of a surprise, at least to me.  As one friend described it, it's a bit of a Frankenprize...

Once more, the annual tradition:  Who do people think will win the Nobel this year in physics or chemistry?  I have repeately and incorrectl...

I've watched the first two episodes of the new adaptation of Foundation .  It surely looks gorgeous, though there are some script chall...

Here are some tidbits from the last day of this year's meeting.  (I didn't really get to see the other posters in my own poster sess...

 More highlights from the meeting.  Office hours for my class conflicted with a couple of the talks, so these are briefer than I would'v...

Somehow I found the first day of the virtual meeting more exhausting than when we do these things in person, probably because I had to go te...

Every two years, the US Department of Energy Experimental Condensed Matter Physics program  has a principal investigator meeting, and I'...

There are back-to-back papers in Nature this week, one out of Columbia and one out of Cornell , using bilayers of transition metal dichalco...

The Hall Effect is an old (1879) story, told in first-year undergraduate physics classes for decades. Once students are told about the Lore...

The Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University invites applications for tenure-track faculty positions in the broad area of expe...

Thermoelectricity is an old story, and I've also discussed it here .  Take a length of some conductor, and hold one end of that conduct...

 Harmonic oscillators are key elements of the physicist's toolkit for modeling the world.  Back at the end of March I wrote about some...

 It's been a busy week, so my apologies for the brevity, but here are a couple of interesting papers and sites that I stumbled upon: Bac...

What does it take to have a material behave as a metal, from the physicist's perspective?  I've written about this before (wow, I...

 While virtual meetings can be draining (no breaks to go hiking; no grabbing a beer and catching up, especially when attendees are spread ou...

This week I'm (virtually) attending this workshop , which unfortunately is zoom-based because of the ongoing pandemic and travel restric...

 Last Friday, Victor Galitski published a thought-provoking editorial on linkedin, entitled " Quantum Computing Hype is Bad for Scienc...